Jonathan Kay on fake anti-Semitism at York U and the credulous Bubbie-net

On Monday night, I got the following email from a well-meaning, but misinformed, Jewish father: “Sarah just called me from York [University in Toronto]. She was attending a class that she wanted to join. Within the first few minutes of introduction to the class, the professor stated his class needs no Internet access; his class is based solely on opinion. ‘What is an opinion?’ he said. ‘Well, I have an opinion that people will find offensive. Jews need to be sterilized. That’s my opinion.’ Sarah walked out and publicly suggested to the other Jewish student in the class to do the same. The other student stayed in the class. Sarah then called me shaken up and livid.”

Turns out Sarah was confused. The professor in question — who happens to be Jewish — actually was using hyperbole to illustrate the sort of vile opinion (“Jews need to be sterilized”) that he didn’t want to hear aired in his classroom. By flying off the handle, Sarah was unwittingly doing an impression of Gilda Radner’s “Oh, well that’s very different” schtick on Saturday Night Live. (“What’s all this fuss I hear about saving Soviet jewelry? What makes Soviet jewelry so special!? …)

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Except that Sarah didn’t stick around for the punch-line. And even when the real story came out, she was too proud to admit her mistake. “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth,” she told the media. “So regardless of the context, I still think that’s pretty serious.” By this weird logic, the fact that Sarah herself repeated the words “Jews should be sterilized” to a reporter means she’s just another presumed hater.

Putting Sarah herself to one side, I found it interesting how quickly the story made the rounds of the internet. Within the space of a few hours on Monday night, five different middle-aged or senior-citizen Jewish correspondents sent me variations on this story. “York U [prof] makes anti-Semetic remark. Verifiable,” read one subject line. Another woman asked: “Do we think he’d say ‘All Muslims are terrorists,’ or ‘All blacks should be slaves’?” With every cycle of mass email forwarding, the story was getting more sensational.

This is part of a trend. When I started this job in 1998, most of the bogus stories I got by email were from younger correspondents — because there just weren’t that many older people online. But then two things happened.

First, young web surfers taught themselves how to check facts, by using Wikipedia and Snopes and other reputable sites. To avoid making reply-all fools of themselves, they stopped mass-forwarding bogus stories of the York U variety.

Second, when those young adults started going off to college, or moving away — their parents had to figure out email and Facebook and Webcams in order to communicate with their kids and view pictures of their grandchildren. But these 50-, 60-, and 70-year old Internauts, having grown up in the age of print, never figured out that most of what you read online is made up. So when their sister-in-law’s hairdresser sends them something shocking, they uncriticially pass it on to their friends.

This explains why many middle-aged people and senior citizens I meet are actually more misinformed and radicalized than their children. Many Tea Party fanatics, in particular, are older white people who have cobbled a political philosophy together from nonsense Internet stories claiming that Barack Obama is Muslim, that global warming has been “debunked” or that universal health care means sending grandma to a “death panel.”

Canada’s Jewish community, I’ve found, is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. Thanks to the dense electronic civil society that binds together Jewish study groups, synagogue congregations and pro-Israel NGOs — call it “Bubbie-and-Zayde-Net” — any story involving anti-Semitism tends to spread like wildfire. A few months ago, for instance, a rumour started that Delta Airlines was going to exclude Jews from its flights because of its commercial relationship with a Saudi airline. The story was completely bogus, but dozens of people sent it to me anyway. To this day, variations on it still land in my inbox.

It’s time to stop the cycle of e-hysteria. And I’m asking young people to be part of the solution. It’s great that you’re going to spend part of Thanksgiving weekend unpacking Bubbie or Zeyda’s new computer, and setting them up with a Gmail account. But your job isn’t done until you’ve taught them the three magic words they should tell themselves when someone emails them something that sounds too shocking to be true: “It probably isn’t.”